Well at last someone with the balls to admit they way things were
handled wasn't the smartest way to do it.
On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 09:49 +0200, Ulf Lamping wrote:
> Erwin Rol wrote:
> > First of all still nobody answered the questions people have on the why
> > this was done, just because Gerald got a new job is no reason.
> >
> Well, Gerald is the founder of the project. He had to leave the
> trademark, website and things at NSI (his former employer),
> with no admin access to the servers.
Can I conclude from that that is was just a personal "fight" between
Gerald and NSI that made him decide to move. Of course this puts up the
question what will happen when Gerald gets a new job after this one, do
we have a rename again? Maybe there should be looked at a way to make
"wireshark" more independent from problems like that.
> We don't know what NSI will do with Ethereal in the future, so it seemed
> a necessary thing to switch things now.
they are both GPL, and lot of people have copyrights on it. I doubt both
wireshark and ethereal will be developed at the same time.
> > So what is the reason of this change?
> >
> See above.
Well it still doesn't really explain why the fork was needed, i mean
Gerald could have worked out things in some other way too.
> > Than it is good to know that all non-core-developers, those that only
> > help with pity little things like bug fixing and one or two little
> > dissectors, are not important enough to be informed about this before it
> > happens.
> >
> I had a bad feeling about this too ...
And so you should! FOSS does also mean you have a community that wants
to know what is going on.
> I'm sorry about the feelings you have on this, and I can understand you
> with this.
> > It would be interesting to know who those core-developers are, and who
> > is that "one notable exception" ?
> >
> Basically all the ones that you'll find in the (public) commit mailing
> lists of wireshark (and formerly Ethereal).
> > Also as mentioned by someone else, it might be a good idea to put a
> > explanation on www.ethereal.com.
> >
> That's not possible for us, as Gerald has no longer the admin right to
> do this.
this really gives a bad taste of some hostile take over :-/
> I agree that the transition was poorly made for the exact reason you've
> mentioned :-(
Well shit happens, as long as someone cleans it up there is no real
problem in the end.
I would suggest to write down a bit more detailed announcement like you
did here and mail that to the ethereal lists and maybe to the larger
distribution lists like fedora, debian, suse etc. And put that
explanation also at the front page of the wireshark site (and hopefully
someone from ethereal.com will do something like that too).
Even if the start wasn't that good, it doesn't mean it has to stay like
that.
- Erwin
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